Yorkshire Dialect: History, Facts and the Glottal Stop

Sophie Mei Lan Malin speaks to the Yorkshire Dialect Society.

Transcript

00:00 Can you tell me about the history of Yorkshire dialect?

00:03 It's Germanic and it comes primarily from the language of the Angles who came from North Germany

00:07 and they settled an empire obviously Anglia, East Anglia, plus two in the north. Northumbria,

00:14 north of the Humber and Mercia to the west of the River Wharf and that later became the three

00:21 ridings. North riding, east riding, west riding, this side of the wharf. It is Germanic and then

00:27 of course the Vikings came and the Scandinavian countries, their languages are Germanic as well

00:34 and when the French came 1066 and all that and they were speaking French at the court in London

00:40 they didn't really communicate with the peasants up north. There's very little influence from the

00:45 Romance languages, from French, Latin on Yorkshire dialect. Very few words. Buffet is one but then it

00:53 has a different meaning. Buffet in French is a sideboard and of course in Yorkshire it's a small

00:58 stool. And how come it was associated with the working classes? Well everybody I suspect

01:05 initially would speak their own dialect and then those who got educated, education does not

01:10 encourage dialect so educated people started to speak what became standard English. It was the

01:18 lower, the working classes people who continued to speak the dialect and this was one of the

01:24 criticisms of that it's a language of common people, of villains and so on, not nice people.

01:30 And where does the glottal stop come into play? What is it? The glottal stop is the t apostrophe

01:39 pronounced as a 't' in front of a vowel but otherwise it's something at the back of the

01:45 throat. Go to the back of the Q becomes go to back of Q which is different to go to back of Q

01:52 without it. Go to back of Q. There's something catching the back of the throat there for the

01:58 glottal stop. Another good example is in the word, the name of the city is Bradford. Now is it Bradford

02:06 or Bratford? Well when I was brought up in Bradford everybody said Bratford. That is the correct

02:13 dialect way of pronouncing this name and it's interesting I say it's Germanic and if you

02:18 translate, well Bradford means Broadford. If you translate that into German you get Bright and

02:27 Foot. Put those together it's also correctly pronounced with a glottal stop in the middle.

02:31 Brightfoot, Bratford, Brightfoot, it's almost the same thing and this is what dialect does,

02:38 it preserves something from the language from which it came which has been lost in standard

02:42 English.